eCommerce holiday planning | Making the most of holiday shopping (2023)

Major South African holidays that your holiday eCommerce strategy should target

There always seems to be a holiday happening in South Africa for one reason or another. These can range from the vitally important, such as National Women’s Day, to the silly and fun, such as Eat Ice Cream for Breakfast Day.

The thing to remember as an eCommerce business is that not a lot of holidays hold relevance to your niche. In fact, there are only five that contain a significant opportunity to boost sales. Don’t get it wrong. Other holidays can be a great opportunity for you to reap the benefits of cause marketing. However, they do not necessarily have a direct impact on sales.

So, which are the five holidays that matter most and what makes them different to the usual holidays of the year?

What makes them different is relatively simple. They are holidays that are tightly intertwined with gift buying. Now, on to which holidays you should firmly set your sights on.

Valentine’s Day

Going in calendar order, Valentine’s Day will be the first one to creep up on you. V-day is a fantastic opportunity for any online business to capitalise on.

Whether you are an online florist, a restaurant taking orders and bookings, or you make unique items to order, a loving spouse is looking for your help. If you don’t want to promote this day of love and relationships, you could always use it to appeal to those celebrating their independence on Anti-Valentine’s Day.

Another opportunity that this holiday offers is the chance to collaborate with some other businesses. You can come together to offer some unique promotions or something both businesses would usually not provide.

For an example of how this could work, look no further than when Gregg’s Launches teamed up with Sony in the UK to create the Greggs Launches PlayStation 5 food box.

Mother’s and Father’s Day

These are technically two occasions, but they essentially serve the same purpose: to shower devoted parents with gratitude and love. Each of these occasions offers an extraordinary opportunity for you to tailor your offers to maximise sales online.

Another positive point to gearing up for the parental praising days is that they offer a far wider scope than our previous entry. Especially if you combine some extraordinary creativity. As high as 88% of consumers planned on celebrating Mother’s Day in 2023, and a staggering 79% planned on commemorating Father’s Day.

Converting even the smallest amount of people from those statistics can be a massive influx of revenue for any company. Making sure your eCommerce holiday readiness is top-tier could mean reaching or failing your quarterly income goals.

Black Friday

No holiday selling eCommerce tips guide would be complete if it didn’t at least mention Black Friday. It is the biggest shopping day of the calendar year. Eager shoppers see it as their chance to get all their Christmas gifts out of the way early. Although most see it as a chance to get that one expensive item, they have been eyeing all year, at a bargain.

According to IOLs 2022 Black Friday statistics, there is a clear trend that South Africans are avoiding busy malls and doing their shopping online. There was a report of one online customer spending R400,000 on their Black Friday shopping spree.

No business can ignore this powerhouse of a holiday. Not participating in Black Friday will only serve to harm your business in the long run and significantly lose out on massive sales numbers in the short term.

Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday is Black Friday’s lesser-known cousin. However, this does not mean it is any less important to your eCommerce planning or strategies. The opposite is actually true, as Black Friday offers deals for both in-store and online customers. In contrast, Cyber Monday is purely an online event.

This is by design, as Cyber Monday was created in 2005 to promote online retail specifically. This is also a day that many shoppers look to check off a few items from their Christmas lists, making it vital to their holiday shopping strategy. This, in turn, has significant potential to affect your bottom line more than most of the other holidays mentioned in this list.

Christmas

Christmas is the proverbial star on top of the eCommerce holidays tree. What started as a religious holiday has become a global phenomenon that spans different cultures, religions, and virtually every country on our globe.

Some Christmas shopping trends will surprise you. As per this holiday report by TGM Research, a whopping 47.8% of South Africans planned to purchase furniture or home décor during the 2022 holiday season. This is a clear indicator that all ecommerce businesses stand to grow during the retail holiday season regardless of their primary industry.

The powerful impact of successfully executing and planning an eCommerce strategy for Christmas cannot be understated. For many, it is a make-or-break holiday, especially considering its impact on logistics and web traffic on an ill-prepared website. Don’t worry about it, though, as everything you need to be ready for this massive rush is just below.

4 holiday eCommerce tips to maximise your holiday readiness

Now that you know which major holidays to focus on, you can dive into the deep end of the four eCommerce tips listed below. It is worth noting you will reap the best results if you pair the following tips with these eCommerce marketing tips for the festive season.

According to the same TGM Research study referenced earlier, 75.6% of South Africans celebrate Christmas, and an eye-watering 89.1% will be purchasing footwear or clothing-related items. This is backed up by who the top five South African eCommerce companies are. Four of the five slots are taken up by clothing stores.

The most interesting and applicable statistics are that 46.3% of South Africans are expecting to spend more over the festive season as they did last year, and 33.4% are planning on spending their money on gifts specifically.

Based on these statistics from the eCommerce holidays of 2022, you can see that there is an upward trend of consumers spending more. The more encouraging statistic is that consumers are more and more likely to spend their money online. Making it extremely vital that your business is more prepared than ever to take full advantage of this upcoming holiday season.

1. Prepare for the increase in online holiday sales

Any form of downtime for your website is an unmitigated nightmare. Now, think of how much of a disaster it would be if it happened during one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.

Luckily, you can implement the next three checkpoints before any busy periods, making unforeseen crashes virtually a thing of the past.

These are easy to implement and will not add a ton of time to your preparations. Frankly, when implemented correctly and often, these three steps can save you from immeasurable damage to your business.

Check your inventory is stocked, then double and triple-check it

Customer service is the name of the game, and you can’t play if you don’t have stock, especially when it comes to gifts. Having an item on backorder with suppliers means that consumers can and will see if other vendors have stock right now. This means you need to be up to speed on the 101 of eCommerce logistics.

Your competitors are never more than one or two clicks away, so making sure you have the hot ticket items well in stock is incredibly vital. Checking your own back orders now with suppliers to ensure they are in your warehouse for December will empower you to keep ahead of any shortages.

Check your website’s reliability

We briefly touched on the nightmare scenario of your store crashing during a big shopping day. This makes ensuring that your website is stable and scalable during peak holiday online shopping hours essential to any online business.

Alongside your scalability and reliability, you need to make sure your website stays fast and secure. Not only will a slow-loading site make customers leave, it may prevent them from showing up in the first place. With all other things being equal, search engines will prioritise faster sites over slower ones.

Site security can honestly be a whole article all by itself, and here it is. Sufficient to say the cliff notes are to make sure your domain and hosting sites are secure. Your site should be operating as an HTTPS URL with the SSL certificate installed on the site. If this is not the case, reach out to your hosting provider for assistance, or you can migrate to Netcash Shop.

Tip:  Netcash Shop offers great reliability, speed and security, as well as a free 30-day trial for you to test it out for yourself.

Check your third-party integrations

Lastly, you will need to check your third-party integrations. Are they all updated? Put them through their paces, and make sure they can handle the rush. If they pass the mustard, then do not add any new ones.

There is a time and place to try out new integrations, but peak holiday season is not that time. Yes, the best eCommerce apps and integrations can have a positive effect on your site’s performance, but it takes time and tweaking to optimise them. More often than not, when new integrations are just thrown in at the last minute, they only slow down your flow or, worse, bring the whole site crashing down.

2. Ensure your customer experience is top-tier

Customer experience is the second prong in the four-pronged fork you are going to use to rule over the holiday seasons from here on out. Customers want a fast, seamless experience and do not want to be looking for a particular item for a long time.

Customers are the lifeblood of holiday eCommerce sales and eCommerce in general, really. So, it is imperative that your business and website cater to them in the ways that they expect. Reading minds is not something you can realistically try and achieve. However, you can use the following industry standards to make sure you are in the best position possible.

Make using the site pleasant

You do not want to spend your money on eCommerce website prices to build your dream business just for it to fail at the first hurdle. So how can you ensure that you are offering a user experience that will have consumers coming back time and time again?

Easy, just follow the six eCommerce tips and tricks below. It is worth noting that speed and security play a large role in this as well, but we have already covered those steps.

Polish your user experience

Your online storefront is the front-facing part of your business. So the user interface of your site should clearly and effortlessly portray your brand. It is important to use tools such as the Netcash Shop Instant Site that will allow you to build beautiful and easy-to-navigate websites.

The final thing to remember when doing your user interface is that there should always be a simple path to the Checkout page. You will learn more about creating a smooth checkout process in a bit. For now, all you need to do is make sure that the checkout button is always within reach.

Change up your merchandising tactics

Determining which products and festive bundles you are going to offer for a given holiday season shopping period can be tough. Doing some market research could uncover some priceless gems, such as specific holiday bundles your target audience could be looking for. Looking into your own past data will also help you determine what your store’s seasonal favourites are.

Once you have discovered your items for the season, you need to decide on how you want them presented on your store’s page. A popular choice for most online stores is to have a dedicated page for all of the holiday items that will make browsing easier for your customers.

Suggest personal items

Another powerful tool you can utilise is suggesting items that appeal to your customer’s personal interests. Think of these as add-on sales in a brick-and-mortar store. Does your customer have a camping set in their wishlist or cart? Then,  you could offer them a camping knife or sleeping bag at the bottom or side of the screen to add to that sale.

The real magic here is not just in add-on sales. You can delve into your customer’s previous buying habits and use this information to make suggestions to them right on the homepage. These tactics have the potential to drastically increase sales and also keep your clients happy as they get the items they want faster.

Make looking for items easier

You know how frustrating it is when you are searching for something on Google and the search results just aren’t what you are looking for. This is exactly what you should strive to avoid on your own website.

This is where you can implement the same SEO guidelines you follow for your site to rank on Google to make items searchable on your site. Tags, descriptions, and how products are named will all be vital to a frictionless browsing experience. Customers reward online stores with fast and accurate search results by returning for future business, just as they would for friendly service in an onsite store.

Optimise checkout

This is an easily overlooked weakness for many online stores. Yes, checkout does serve as a great opportunity to get valuable information from your clients. However, more often than not, it just proves to be a frustrating experience for consumers.

Imagine having to fill out three separate forms and standing in a long, slow-moving queue at the grocery store when all you want is some bread and milk. This is exactly what a complicated online checkout process feels like to customers. Thankfully, there are six easy ways to make your checkout process as simple as possible.

Make checkout just one page

Putting all of the required information and fields for customers to fill out on one page makes your checkout process simpler and faster. A secondary effect is that it keeps your website fast as well, giving your clients less time to change their minds.

Allow customers to checkout as a guest

Clients are hesitant to give personal data due to those pesky personal data brokers and call centres. This is especially true for first-time users of your online store. Allowing a customer to check out anonymously will show your business’s integrity and trustworthiness and inspire confidence in consumers to come back and make an account.

Offer multiple payment options

We all love options because you never know what payment methods clients have available to them. Most will have a spending account with one of South Africa’s major banks, but some may have more obscure payment methods. This is why Netcash Shop offers the Netcash eCommerce Payment Gateway (Pay Now). No one wants to lose a sale due to preventable mishaps such as not supporting Scan to Pay or Ozow Instant EFT.

Allow them to use more than one delivery address

One way you can drastically save time and frustration for your clients doing some holiday shopping online is to allow them to deliver a single order to multiple addresses. We all have loved ones scattered across the globe. Therefore, allowing your clients to make one purchase with multiple delivery addresses makes your store a one-stop shop for their holiday shopping season.

Allow shoppers to choose when it gets delivered

Not all shoppers are the same. Some will want to buy and receive their planned gifts months in advance, while others wait until the last minute and need express delivery. In order for you to be their saving grace in those last few days of the season or the hero that has what they need months before that special day, you must offer the shipping options they require.

Take the stress out of online holiday shopping by offering shipping insurance

The final step you can take to stand out from the crowd of online stores is to offer shipping insurance to your customers. Shipping insurance provides your clientele with peace of mind during the bumpy and fast-paced delivery process. Additionally, it calms any nerves about spoiling that special moment when their loved one gets to open the gift.

Send a friendly reminder if a cart gets abandoned

Clients abandon carts for all sorts of reasons, from load-shedding, bringing an untimely end to their shopping spree to overly complicated checkout procedures. Regardless of why they have forsaken their carts, these are customers who have shown intent to buy and are highly likely to be converted into buying customers

Simply sending a friendly reminder that they, in fact, have a cart filled with goodies waiting for them can inspire them to come back and complete the transaction. According to moosend.com’s statistics, a staggering 45% of abandoned cart notifications get opened, and 10.7% of those are converted into sales. This could serve as the difference between a successful or unsuccessful holiday selling season.

Ramp up customer service and support

As discussed earlier, many carts can be deserted due to slow-loading times, complicated checkout processes or simply because shoppers need help and cannot find it. Yes, an abandoned cart notification can help bring them back, but prevention is always better than a cure.

This means that ramping up your customer support for busy holidays needs to be high on your priority list. Here are some bullet points for you to implement or use as a checklist to make sure you have these essential services in place:

• Make sure that your eCommerce platform is available when you need it most. There is no bigger nightmare for an online business than having your site crash mid-holiday season, and your platform provider is closed for the entire season. Netcash Shop’s support prides itself on always getting back to clients within 24 hours, outside of public holidays.
• Having a robust customer service plan is essential to the success of your business during and outside of the holiday season. Set up a dedicated support line with emails, phone numbers and, if possible, a live chat option.
• Once these support systems are in place, the next step is to make sure all of your support contact details are easy to find.
• Setbacks and mistakes might be the best learning opportunities, but they do not have to be the only ones. If you send a survey or review to all customers, happy or disappointed, you can learn a lot. Reviews are a great place to learn helpful information, such as underwhelming products or procedures or which ones performed better than expected.

3. Make receiving an order from your store feel like an occasion

During the holidays, standing out from all of the other online stores is a real challenge. One way you can stand out head and shoulders above your competitors is by making your eCommerce packages’ unboxing experience one to remember.

Creating beautiful packages that you can unbox in interesting and fun ways has a two-sided effect. The first is that both the shopper and gift receiver will remember the moment and are likely to recommend your business to others and use your services again.

The second and equally as powerful effect is that they may share the moment on social media driving your business’ exposure and reach. A viral moment has the potential to extend your brand recognition further than any planned digital marketing strategy ever could.

4. Create bespoke holiday ecommerce sales and promotions

Each holiday is unique in what shoppers are looking for to give as gifts. This makes it extremely important to do some market research and find your hot items for each holiday. Creating a well-targeted promotion could be the incentive someone needs to finally pull the trigger on that item that has been languishing on their wishlist for months.

Additionally, offering product options and variations that align with the theme of a particular holiday can make for some great stocking stuffers, last-minute gifts or a gift for that quirky uncle whom no one knows what to buy for.

Final thoughts on eCommerce holiday planning

The holiday season is coming fast, and even though success is never guaranteed, if you follow this guide, it will give you the best opportunity to make the most of it. That being said, if all of this seems like a lot for you to take on, you can always subscribe to Netcash shop’s innovative eCommerce features that will make all of the above a worry of the past.